Inside the Guide: Where’s My Money?

Hello, and welcome to "Inside the Guide," the column that gives you an in-depth look at writing guides for GameFAQs.com. My name is Michael Gray. I have written exactly 100 different guides, and today

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Hello, and welcome to “Inside the Guide,” the column that gives you an in-depth look at writing guides for GameFAQs.com. My name is Michael Gray. I have written exactly 100 different guides, and today, I’m going to start off with the number one, most frequently asked question by potential guide writers.

Q: Will I get paid to write a guide?

A: *laughs so hard that milk comes flying out his nose*

That’s right, nobody gets paid to write online guides. Writing a guide is a free public service, sort of like Wikipedia, except professors don’t get mad at you for citing online guides. No one in the history of the world has ever gotten money from his or her guide writing…

…Except Daniel Engel.

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For those of you who don’t know, Daniel Engel is one of those all-time, GameFAQs legends. He has written over 400 guides, and along with me, he is featured in the GameFAQs top 50 contributors. However, I’m near the bottom of the list, whereas he is at the very top, because the list is alphabetical.

No, wait, he’s higher than me because he’s written four to six times as much material as I have. That’s why he’s at #3 in category 2 of the outdated Hall of Fame list, whereas I’m at #10.

At the end of every single guide Danny makes, he has a little section entitled Please Give Me Money. That’s not what he calls it, but that’s basically what it says. Quote:

###############################################################################
(G) EXPERIMENTAL
###############################################################################

For a little while now I’ve had a paypal link in all my FAQs at the very bottom
here.  Mainly as a small experiment since a few other FAQ authors have also had
the same idea.

I had a few people email me before I put this link in because they wanted to
send money, so it’s here for those people.

For the record I’ve received about $87 (which works out to a bit more in
Canadian lol) last I checked, so I’ve been getting cases of pop and making some
excellent progress on a few FAQs.

If you don’t want to send money or can’t then send me an email, it’s nice to
hear what people thought about my work and there’s always room for improvement.

I don’t believe it. He’s made $87 in donations from writing free guides on the Internet? That’s not possible! Is it?

Naturally, I decided that as a guide writer who would very much like to have $87 so I could purchase Super Mario Galaxy 2, I had to get in on this scheme. So when I wrote my guide for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, I included a short “feel free to donate money to me on PayPal so I can buy more games!” blurb. That was two years ago, and my guide has gotten 24,072 views since then. Time to go on PayPal and see how much cash I’ve received…

1
Slightly modified to protect the user's privacy.


Seven dollars and forty-seven cents? That’s kind of a weird amount to donate. Let’s take a closer look by clicking the “details” link…

2

Oh, right. My family bought me a copy of Barbie Island Princess as a joke, so I sold it on eBay. I got seven bucks for it, too. All right!

Anyway, where was I? Guides for videogames, right. Well, as my adventures with PayPal have clearly shown, it is impossible to get any money for writing free online guides. After all, nobody wants to pay for something that is already free. I suspect Mr. Engel made the whole thing up. The end.

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About the Contributor


From 2007 to 2016

Michael Gray is a staff writer for GameCola, who focuses on adventure games, videos and writing videogame walkthroughs.

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